Aliens of the Deep

I hope you all had a great weekend! It's Monday morning here in the Bay area and it's not raining, so that's a good sign. I went to Phoenix over the weekend, and in addition to getting some spectacular photographs of the landscape, I saw the IMAX 3D film, Aliens of the Deep.

It's an excellent film, about 50 minutes long, which shows deep sea life at its extreme, and how that could possibly aid our search for life on other worlds.

From the brochure:

James Cameron, Academy Award winning director, deep ocean adventurer, and space exploration visionary, combines his talents and his passions in the upcoming spectacular 3D film Aliens of the Deep. Cameron takes audiences to one of the Earth's most extreme environments-the depths of the ocean-to encounter the alien-like creatures that live there. He's joined in the journey by a team of young oceanographers and NASA mission scientists who share his interests and excitement as they help us consider the correlations between life under water and the life we may one day find in outer space.

Aliens of the Deep presents the dramatic and visually stunning highlights of a series of expeditions to deep ocean oases-hydrothermal vents where super heated chemical and mineral charged water give life to some of the strangest animals on earth. Six foot tall worms with blood-red plumes, blind white crabs, and an astonishing biomass of white shrimp, all compete to find just the right location in the flow of the super heated water. They are as close to alien life as anything seen on Earth, a clue to what might exist elsewhere in the universe. This adventure brings the audience as close as possible to imagining what it will be like to travel far into space and meet aliens face to face.

Some of the visual effects were done by Blur, and consisted mainly of what these alien creatures would look like. The film described how it could be possible that life under the oceans of a neighbor planet's moon (Jupiter's Europa) could exist. Currently there exists a plan to launch a remotely operated satellite to Europa to study what is underneath its icy oceans.

The sterwoscopic footage shown in the film is nothing short of spectacular. Awesome underwater eruptions of superheated water, alien animals that have never seen the sun. From depths of 850 to 3500 meters, there are an astonishing array of living creatures that thrive just on the heat and water of the ocean.

My brother and I were the only twenty-something guys in the crowd, while the rest of the audience was comprised of families and the elderly. If there is an IMAX theatre near you, I would definitely recommend this film. An amazing look into a world that none of us have seen.